Our deepest insights must—and should—appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and predestined for them.
– Beyond Good and Evil
Briefly and regrettably, they belong to the LEVELLERS, these wrongly named “free spirits”—as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the democratic taste and its “modern ideas” all of them men without solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to be denied, only, they are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost ALL human misery and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto existed—a notion which happily inverts the truth entirely! What they would fain attain with all their strength, is the universal, green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for every one, their two most frequently chanted songs and doctrines are called “Equality of Rights” and “Sympathy with All Sufferers”—and suffering itself is looked upon by them as something which must be DONE AWAY WITH.
– Beyond Good and Evil
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
– Beyond Good and Evil
A man’s estimates of value betray something of the STRUCTURE of his soul, and wherein it sees its conditions of life, its intrinsic needs.
– Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche MAY have been an atheist but his use of the word “predestined” in this quote would imply the existence of a higher power.
I have always thought that when Nietzsche said “God is dead” he meant it in the sense that the western culture with it’s emphasis on materialism and selfishness has ignored God so that from the point of view of the average person, God has truly died.
I found his use of those words interesting, too, I’m not quite sure what he meant by it. Definitely agree his point was much more powerfully about western culture abandoning everything good that “God” had brought. I found it interesting that one of his biggest beefs wasn’t against Christians per se but against Christians living a given morality more because they were afraid of the consequences than truly believing in it.